The Times interviews Jarvis Cocker

Cocker divides his time between Paris and London (he has a place in trendy Shoreditch), with regular forays back to his home town of Sheffield. But he wants to remain in the French capital for his son, who is at school in the city. And he has established a life there – one of his friends is the American film-maker Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums), another expat.

Anderson has created a role for Cocker in his forthcoming, stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox. “Petey” is a mandolin-strumming puppet who looks and sounds like his real-life counterpart. Cocker and Anderson have written a song for the film — “a little hoedown number”, says Cocker, who also wrote music for and had a cameo role in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. “I did a narration bit at the start of Mr Fox, too, but they showed that to test audiences in the US and they were very bamboozled. So I’ve ended up on the cutting-room floor. I tried to enunciate clearly!”